


Sebastopol

by KittyViolet



Category: New Mutants (Comics), X-Men (Comicverse)
Genre: Alien Technology, Butterflies, Costume generator, F/F, Fluff and Smut, Outer Space, Puns & Word Play, Shower Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-22
Updated: 2020-08-22
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:06:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,589
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26041645
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KittyViolet/pseuds/KittyViolet
Summary: "No, I'm literally wet."
Relationships: Kitty Pryde/Illyana Rasputin
Kudos: 9





	Sebastopol

“That’s Rigel,” Kate says. She’s still, after so much has happened, excited to be back in space.

Illyana pretends to look bored, then gives up and smiles. “You do know Rigel’s the name of a minor demon as well. But the star looks pretty from here.” She pauses. “How do you know it’s Rigel? The sky looks so different. Astrology-based spells don’t work right here, you know. The patterns are all mixed up.”

Kate leans back into the plush couch on the observation deck. “You use an astrology-based spell to do your hair?” And indeed Illyana has lost her bangs.

“No, I just thought it was time.”

“I thought the bangs were cute. Did you cut them with scissors yourself then?”

“You think everything I do is cute. And no, I used lasers. In low gravity, efficient scissoring is not a thing.”

Kate shrugs and leans in closer. There’s nobody else up here; the rest of the away team’s either asleep below decks or in the cockpit. By this time tomorrow they’ll land on the Shi’ar homeworld, visit with Berto and Sam and their polycule, and then head to Q’rcd as protection for the exiled Q’rcd opposition leader, who would not accept Shi’ar protection directly (there’s a colonial history there) but needed to put some muscle between xyrself and the ruling Mnooks. It’s a mess, but there may be mutants involved—off-Earth mutants, like Warbird and Warlock—and frankly Kate missed space: that’s why she agreed to go. 

Illyana runs her hand through Kate’s thick curls. “Please never straighten your hair again,” Illyana says. “Also, remind me why I’m here?”

“Because the Mnooks may have a monarchist sorcerer,” Kate says. 

“Not the good kind of monarchist, I suppose,” Illyana shrugs, producing a monarch butterfly from the short sleeve of her black T-shirt dress. "Hey, that worked! Maybe I can cast spells out here."

“Now do viceroys,” Kate smiles. Illyana waves her hands and the observation deck is a butterfly garden. Wings flutter all over. Kate smiles again and then frowns. “They’re going to need something to eat.” Nothing like the vision of several hundred starved-to-death butterflies to ruin a romantic night.

Illyana stands up and pretends to get lost in deep thought, resting her chin on her hand. “You are so…. so…. lawful good!” Then she starts to draw a few sigils in air. “Monarchs eat milkweed, right?”

“I guess I don’t change much,” says Kate, trying and failing to wink at her lover. Then there’s a sploosh of white liquid in midair, and a whole grove, three feet square, of thriving marijuana plants. More splooshes pop into existence over Kate’s head and around her feet; one just missed the couch. Her hair’s wet and smells sweet. Sploosh again: so does Illyana’s.

“Milk. Weed.” Kate rolls her eyes.

“The lack of constellations threw me off. Hold on.” Then splorch after splorch fills the deck as the butterflies scatter: dozens of milkweed pods fill the room. Some burst in midair. Thick, sticky white liquid splashes over Illyana’s plain black T-shirt dress, over Kate’s vintage button-down sleeveless nightgown. A zephyr of orange and black wings rises up to the top of the dome, then glides down to investigate the delicious (if you’re a monarch) foliage.

Stray pods and what appear to be school-sized milk cartons and the occasional seven-leaf stem are still popping up and blowing up in midair, making a harmless mess on the floor, on the least lucky among the hundreds of butterflies, on Illyana and Kate. Illyana’s sleep dress now has a spreading gray stain right beside her left breast. Kate, who’s trying not to giggle, stops trying and giggles briefly. The giggle fades when she sees just how big the milk stain down her front appears to be. A Morpho butterfly lands on her thigh and flaps away.

Kate runs a hand through her own milk- and milkweed-stained hair. So does Illyana, who then takes a one-finger taste of the liquid she finds.

“A bit gluey, but not bad,” she says, raising one eyebrow. Illyana can do that. It’s always reminded Kate of Mr. Spock, who may or may not have been her first non-girl crush.

“I’m a bit gluey myself,” Kate answers. “More than a bit.” Another exploding milkweed pod squirts goo on her bare knee. “I’m not sure I want to go to bed like this.” 

“So you're saying you want to go to bed,” Illyana says. Another woman—one with a worse sense of humor—might apologize for the mess: Illyana just might be enjoying it. Surely the butterflies are (three land on her head). 

“Quick shower?” Kate asks. Illyana nods, so Kate grabs her girlfriend’s hand and they phase through the floor, then run, insubstantial but still milk- and plant-stained, into a round chamber that looks very familiar. Kate takes care to phase them, not through the tech-filled walls, but through the sliding door. 

Inside, where the pair materialize, the kidney-shaped, spacious chamber has soft but clearly waterproof shimmery walls and floors, recessed holes in near the tops of the walls, and a wires-and-screens-and-nozzles gadget hanging near the center of the ceiling, like a sewing machine on a chain crossed with a Jumbotron.

“You’re enjoying this,” Kate says, looking down at her nearly-translucent nightgown, where the outline of one nipple shows clearly through the streaks and stains. She’s feeling that light kind of pleasurable shame that she and Illyana haven’t had for a while.

“Aren’t you?” Illyana responds.

“Touché,” Kate says.

Illyana runs a finger from Kate’s collarbone to her bellybutton. “I know French,” Illyana teases.

“Mais oui,” Kate answers. “I’m touched. But maybe we do want to, you know, get ourselves clean before we retire to quarters?”

Illyana nearly lifts her T-shirt dress over her head, then plants her feet and simply rips the dress in two vertically: it falls off as she steps forward, one sleeve falling to the left of her, one sleeve to the right. “I recognize this! from those pictures you showed me,” Illyana says, balling up the wet cotton and throwing it into what would be a corner, if the chamber had any corners. 

Kate has trouble taking her eyes off Illyana’s wet panties. Wet, she tells herself, from milkweed pods. From milk. From the exploding spell. “Sebastopol,” Illyana says.

“What?” Why is Kate’s girlfriend talking about the Crimea?

“Sebastopol. SABAST OP/OL. The Shi’ar machine you told me about—you showed me a picture, too—from your first time in space.”

Now Kate remembers. “Shi’ar Advanced Bath And Shower Technology; Outfit Production/ Outfit Lineation. Yes! That’s a costume generating machine up there.” 

When she was Kitty—when she had barely fought with the X-Men more than a handful of times—she used that costume generating machine to save her teammates’ lives, masquerading as the dreaded Dark Phoenix to trick the Shi’ar into letting them go. 

The machine here’s the same, but the chamber’s much larger: fit for showers and baths and other self-care, as well as for creating, and trying on, and dissolving, fashion experiments, Glamordo’s and Glamordon’ts. (Kitty—and probably Kate, still—has a history of Glamordon’ts.)

“Dress-up, roomie?” Illyana asks, remembering what they use to call each other, back when their romance was an open secret. 

Kate can’t decide if she wants to get clean first—it is a hot shower, a lovely high-pressure one, after all, and she hasn’t showered since she convinced Illyana to come into space—or if she wants to try creating outfits.

She decides not to decide, and hits both buttons. Whichever one made palm contact first, that’s what they’ll do.

At first it works: it’s the costume generator, the OP/OL part of SABAST OP/OL, and the design matrix embraces Kate like an old friend. She makes herself a outfit for Republican France, fabric almost exposing her small breasts, and then a shimmery kimono with another kimono for Illyana (Kate’s is eye-poppingly psychedelic, Illyana’s deep black with inset stars). She makes Illyana leather motorcycle gear, and studded leather armor, and a sport coat to go with distressed, soft, tight denim knee shorts. She makes herself a spangly leotard, and a fluffy catsuit, and an asymmetrically cut knit dress whose smooth fabric resembles nothing on Earth. 

Tiny pipes in the walls and ceiling weave and weave everything; all Kate and Illyana need to do is think, and gesture in air so that the generator can see the lines they want, and fine-tune on the holographic projections before the fabric appears. It’s like dressing up paper dolls except it’s real, and if you want you can keep the clothes.

A deep-cut linen tunic with a deliberately unfinished hem strikes Illyana as a bit too long, impractical, impossible over jeans. “Can we cut this manually once it’s done?” she asks.

“Only if you take out your soulsword,” Kate says. “Once the clothing gets done it’s done. Like a 3D printer. Sort of.”

“You can’t just go get fabric shears? Or, like, ultra-sharp scissors?”

“Scissoring,” Kate breathes, “is not a thing. It’s just not a thing.”

Illyana snorts. “I’m wet,” she says.

“That was direct,” Kate quips.

“No, I’m literally wet.” So is Kate, now: the microtubules in the unit have started to spray jets of warm water along with fabric. There’s soap and shampoo and body scrub pumping up from the fountain set in the floor on one side, too. Gentle steam rises around it.

“I guess we’re moving to bath and shower tech. I’ll make sure the generator knows what we designed so we can keep it for later. Hey!”

One of the shower jets hits Kate hard at the top of her shoulder blade: it’s like there’s proto-fabric polymer in the water. Kate flinches, then decides she likes it, and shrugs so her sapphire off-one-shoulder minidress just slips off.

Illyana looks happy too. A few of the jets—especially from the handheld showerhead she’s now holding, protruding from the floor—have that filmy, thicker look about them too. She turns the shower head on Kate and tickles her, right on her belly. The jets are getting harder, almost like.... well, gentle vibrators. Many at once.

Kate hasn’t been tickled for months. She’s so responsive that she giggles and then giggles some more and almost phases, and then accidentally on purpose slips and falls on her butt on the slick-soft Shi’ar-tech floor, leaving her thighs parted so that Illyana can move the shower head—still firing slightly-thicker-than-water liquid—from one thigh to the other.

“I can’t stop,” Kate says, and then giggles some more.

“I don’t want you to stop,” Illyana says, leaning forward. That unfinished linen tunic is all soaked through: it’s a kind of off-white with a black belt, so Kate can see everything.

“I…. it can’t stop. The bath and shower tech is…. interfering with the clothing gen…. generator. Sorcerer’s…. Apprentice style. It’s…. keeping going….” Kate’s smiling as she explains, no longer sitting up, now on her back. She’s loving it but she still wants Illyana to know.

“Sorcerer’s Apprentice, huh. I know something about that.” Now Ilya raises both eyebrows. She’s standing over Kate with the milky shower head, with other jets and streams running through Illyana’s blond hair, down her back, down the backs of her knees. so warm it’s comfortable, and faintly sweet.

“You can drink it,” Kate says. “I think.”

Illyana licks her lips: sweet, like marzipan. Then she bends forward and touches her lips to Kate.

“Mmmmm.” Kate is a drum head. Kate is an Etch-a-Sketch. Kate is a sandcastle as the tide comes in, rearranged by warm fluid everywhere, stroking her unevenly with all its falling streams and sprays and droplets. It’s hot, in a good way. Sizzling, in fact. “Sizzling,” she says, without context.

“Sizzling is not a thing,” Illyana ripostes, and continues to play the out-of-control shower head over Kate’s hair, her breasts, her waist, below. Kate’s fingers move to her own… she’s open-mouthed now, head tilted slightly back so Illyana can bend forward to kiss her and then draw back, moving back and forth and waiting for Illyana’s tail to manifest so that Illyana can bring it forward, catch the hard, inevitable, warm rain on the tail’s triangular tip and then fold the tail into position to move inside Kate, so slightly, like a finger, two fingers, while Kate’s wet hand stays where she placed it—

\--outside the ship she can see, in her mind’s eye, the stars, and then in the chamber her lover’s eyes, the tail inside her, her hand--

Kate hasn’t come so loudly in a long time. Illyana briefly wonders if the sound will bring their teammates, then realizes Kate wouldn’t let herself get that loud if the sound baffling on Shi’ar ships weren’t what it is. She drops to her knees and takes Kate in her arms and waves her tail with a flourish, sliding her tail back in, letting the weedy rain, the thick rain, the unnatural rain, just fall on her like a massage, a massage that could reach every part of Illyana’s body as Illyana’s tail reached forward, and every nerve below her waist and above her knees pulsed in sympathy with the tail—

\-- the rhythm of the artificial rain and the thick wetness of liquid that was supposed to harden, but did not harden, into silk, leather, nylon, taffeta, satin, cotton, anything you could wear, the way they’re wearing, wrapped up in, clothed by, this Sorcerer’s Apprentice-style, malfunctioning Sebastopol rain—

\--the beach at Sebastopol, the warm foamy waves on her ankles, up her calves to her knees--

\--Kate's hips, the curls, the invitation between them, her tail, waving--

\--and Illyana closes her eyes and the two lean on each other, momentarily exhausted.

It’s Kate who opens them first. “Time to get out?” she asks happily. The “rain” is still going; low pools are starting to form in channels on the floor.

“Bed… time. Bathtub ring,” Illyana says, pointing down at concentric ripples. “Ours. See?”

“Are you giving me a ring?”

“Maybe. Ours. Take it!”

“One, we’re already engaged, two, you’re the best, three, we can’t just pick it up from the water because it’s a series of rings made by the water, unless you’re planning to cast a spell to make it solid and then just seize it, and then it would have to stay solid for longer.”

“Spell lasts an hour,” Illyana says, smiling.

“’Seize hour ring’ is not a thing,” Kate says. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Let's blow some popsicles, joint,” Illyana agrees, and Kate decides that the not-quite-right idiom is so charming she'll never correct it. They’re both so tired that Kate simply phases them through the wall of the SABAST OP/OL—incidentally stopping the unit from wasting more water, by disrupting its tech—and then they head upstairs to towel off and turn in.

“Stargazing tomorrow again?” Kate asks. “I can show you the circle of stars named for a Roman emperor—”

“Caesar ring is not a thing,” Illyana interjects. “Please stop.”

“Stargazing tomorrow. No more puns,” Kate promises, shimmying into her soft, worn Elfquest sleeping shirt. “I promise to keep everything clean.”

Illyana pauses before pulling up the covers on her own sleeping form and turning to Kitty to kiss her. “Keep everything clean? Why would you want to do that?”

“Well, we do have a new way to get dirty. And then clean.”

“In that case let's get dirty again. Tomorrow?”

"Tomorrow. I might even have some new sleepwear to design."


End file.
